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AI & I

AI & I

Dan Shipper 115 Episodes Aug 19, 2026

Learn how the smartest people in the world are using AI to think, create, and relate. Each week I interview founders, filmmakers, writers, investors, and others about how they use AI tools like ChatGPT, Claude, and Midjourney in their work and in their lives. We screen-share through their historical chats and then experiment with AI live on the show. Join us to discover how AI is changing how we think about our world—and ourselves.

Episodes

The AI Alien Companion App That's Bringing In $4M a Year (Best of the Pod)
The AI Alien Companion App That's Bringing In $4M a Year (Best of the Pod) Aug 19, 2026 4928 LLMs are a new medium for storytelling.That’s according to the creators of Portola, the company behind Tolan: an embodied AI companion that lives on its own planet and chats to you with a distinct personality. In 2025, Portola's founder and CEO Quinten Farmer and Head of Story Eliot Peper joined Dan Shipper to explain how they’re building this new medium from scratch. Their aim is to help
Microsoft’s Vision for an Internet Made for Agents With CTO Kevin Scott (Best of the Pod)
Microsoft’s Vision for an Internet Made for Agents With CTO Kevin Scott (Best of the Pod) Aug 12, 2026 1683 In 2025, Kevin Scott bet that the agentic web would be the next big thing in AI.The Microsoft CTO argued that for agents to be genuinely useful, they'd need to be able to take action on our behalf—which would mean giving them access to the same sprawl of tools, data, and systems that make up the internet. Today, that bet is starting to pay off, as the foundational infrastructure for the a
Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social (Best of the Pod)
Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social Why the Next Hit AI Product Will Be Social (Best of the Pod) Aug 5, 2026 2915 Most consumer AI so far has been single-player: you and a chatbot, alone.Benchmark partner Sarah Tavel, one of Pinterest's first 30 employees, is betting that's about to change. She's looking for a product genius who can build an AI product with social DNA: status, network effects, and multiplayer dynamics. That'll enable users of ChatGPT and other models to learn from how others use AI a
Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success
Best of the Pod: Wired's Kevin Kelly on Why AI Is a 50-year Overnight Success Jul 29, 2026 3222 Kevin Kelly has spent over 30 years experiencing the edge of new technology: from the earliest days of the internet to the first years of Burning Man. But he’s always treated the frontier as a place to visit, not somewhere to live. It’s partially how he’s been able to stay grounded through tech’s various hype cycles.As founding executive editor of Wired and author of The Inevitable, Kelly
How Every's Team Used AI to Ship Its Biggest Launch Ever
How Every's Team Used AI to Ship Its Biggest Launch Ever Jul 22, 2026 2791 Yash Poojary, a growth engineer at Every, dropped an idea for a campaign in Slack at 7 p.m. Instead of building it himself, Every’s head of growth Austin Tedesco took a screenshot of the Slack thread, dropped it into Codex, typed "Can you do this?", and went to the gym.By the time he got back, Codex had built four audience segments, drafted emails for each one, and pulled a social image t
The Founder of a $1.5B AI Company on What Comes After the First Wave of AI Apps
The Founder of a $1.5B AI Company on What Comes After the First Wave of AI Apps Jul 15, 2026 3579 “Running a startup is a knife fight whether things are going well or not,” says Chris Pedregal, cofounder and CEO of Granola. Granola recently raised a $125 million series C round at a $1.5 billion valuation on the strength of its AI meeting notetaker.That valuation hasn’t made Pedregal complacent. Granola built its name as the first to make good AI meeting notes, but Notion, OpenAI, and
How a Writer Uses AI Without Losing His Voice
How a Writer Uses AI Without Losing His Voice Jul 8, 2026 3188 Craig Mod used to pay Campaign Monitor roughly $7,000 a year to send his newsletters. After rebuilding the tool himself with AI, his bill is closer to $150. It’s the kind of thing that convinces him we’re about to enter a “golden age of tool building”—one where anyone can build tools specifically suited to their needs, instead of settling for software from incumbents that are slow to inno
The AI Workflows Behind Every's Consulting Team
The AI Workflows Behind Every's Consulting Team Jul 1, 2026 2477 Natalia Quintero joined Every as head of consulting with a mandate to bring AI into the workflows of executives at hedge funds, private equity firms, and tech companies. She is also a recent Codex convert—someone who spent months resisting the tool before Dan Shipper’s daily pestering finally got her to try it.Natalia encountered Codex as a non-technical builder who had learned to navigat
Building a School Where AI Models Learn About Humanity
Building a School Where AI Models Learn About Humanity Jun 24, 2026 2629 If scaling laws hold—and Surge AI CEO Edwin Chen believes they do—we’re hurtling toward a future where there’s nothing humans can do that AI can’t do better. When OpenAI’s models disproved an open conjecture posed by mathematician Paul Erdős using novel algebraic geometry techniques, Fields medalist Timothy Gowers felt the shift acutely. He initially thought the model had proved an upper
GitHub’s COO Explains Why AI Hasn’t Replaced Developers
GitHub’s COO Explains Why AI Hasn’t Replaced Developers Jun 17, 2026 1688 Last year, there were 1 billion commits on GitHub. This year, Kyle Daigle expects that number to exceed 14 billion, a two-component explosion caused by more humans—and their agents—issuing pull requests. In March alone, 17 million pull requests on GitHub were created by agents.Daigle is the COO of GitHub and Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for developer products. He’s been at GitHub f
How Anthropic Uses Claude Fable 5 With Mike Krieger
How Anthropic Uses Claude Fable 5 With Mike Krieger Jun 10, 2026 3127 Mike Krieger built one of the most consequential consumer apps of the last two decades as the cofounder of Instagram. He is now at the frontier of AI-native product development as head of Anthropic Labs, the team responsible for figuring out what the most capable AI models can do in the hands of real builders.When Krieger first got access to Fable 5 months before its public release, it wa
The SaaS Apocalypse Is a Goldmine With Figma’s Matt Colyer
The SaaS Apocalypse Is a Goldmine With Figma’s Matt Colyer Jun 3, 2026 2034 The "SaaSpocalypse"—the panic that AI will make software-as-a-service obsolete—hasn't rattled Figma’s Matt Colyer. As the company’s director of product management for developers, he's been building his own agents for two years and is buying more software services than ever.In addition to making the case that AI is a “goldmine” for SaaS companies, Colyer talked with Dan Shipper for AI &amp

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